Installation instructions for PostgreSQL 7.0. Commands were tested on RedHat Linux version 5.2 using the bash shell. Except where noted, they will probably work on most systems. Commands like ps and tar may vary wildly between platforms on what options you should use. Use common sense before typing in these commands. If you haven't gotten the PostgreSQL distribution, get it from ftp.postgresql.org, then unpack it: $ gunzip postgresql-7.0.tar.gz $ tar -xf postgresql-7.0.tar $ mv postgresql-7.0 /usr/src Again, these commands might differ on your system. Before you start Building PostgreSQL requires GNU make. It will not work with other make programs. On GNU/Linux systems GNU make is the default tool, on other systems you may find that GNU make is installed under the name "gmake". We will use that name from now on to indicate GNU make, no matter what name it has on your system. To test for GNU make enter $ gmake --version If you need to get GNU make, you can find it at ftp://ftp.gnu.org. Up to date information on supported platforms is at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/admin/ports.htm. In general, most Unix-compatible platforms with modern libraries should be able to run PostgreSQL. In the doc subdirectory of the distribution are several platform-specific FAQ and README documents you might wish to consult if you are having trouble. Although the minimum required memory for running PostgreSQL can be as little as 8MB, there are noticable speed improvements when expanding memory up to 96MB or beyond. The rule is you can never have too much memory. Check that you have sufficient disk space. You will need about 30 Mbytes for the source tree during compilation and about 5 Mbytes for the installation directory. An empty database takes about 1 Mbyte, otherwise they take about five times the amount of space that a flat text file with the same data would take. If you run the regression tests you will temporarily need an extra 20MB. To check for disk space, use $ df -k Considering today's prices for hard disks, getting a large and fast hard disk should probably be in your plans before putting a database into production use. Installation Procedure PostgreSQL Installation For a fresh install or upgrading from previous releases of PostgreSQL: 1. Create the PostgreSQL superuser account. This is the user the server will run as. For production use you should create a separate, unprivileged account (postgres is commonly used). If you do not have root access or just want to play around, your own user account is enough. Running PostgreSQL as root, bin, or any other account with special access rights is a security risk and therefore won't be allowed. You need not do the building and installation itself under this account (although you can). You will be told when you need to login as the database superuser. 2. If you are not upgrading an existing system then skip to step 4. You now need to back up your existing database. To dump your fairly recent post-6.0 database installation, type $ pg_dumpall > db.out If you wish to preserve object id's (oids), then use the -o option when running pg_dumpall. However, unless you have a special reason for doing this (such as using OIDs as keys in tables), don't do it. Make sure to use the pg_dumpall command from the version you are currently running. However, do not use the pg_dumpall script from 6.0 or everything will be owned by the PostgreSQL super user. In that case you should grab pg_dumpall from a later 6.x.x release. 7.0's pg_dumpall will not work on older databases. If you are upgrading from a version prior to Postgres95 v1.09 then you must back up your database, install Postgres95 v1.09, restore your database, then back it up again. Caution You must make sure that your database is not updated in the middle of your backup. If necessary, bring down postmaster, edit the permissions in file /usr/local/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf to allow only you on, then bring postmaster back up. 3. If you are upgrading an existing system then kill the database server now. Type $ ps ax | grep postmaster This should list the process numbers for a number of processes, similar to this: 263 ? SW 0:00 (postmaster) 777 p1 S 0:00 grep postmaster Type the following line, with pid replaced by the process id for process postmaster (263 in the above case). (Do not use the id for the process "grep postmaster".) $ kill pid Tip: On systems which have PostgreSQL started at boot time, there is probably a startup file which will accomplish the same thing. For example, on a Redhat Linux system one might find that $ /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres.init stop works. Also move the old directories out of the way. Type the following: $ mv /usr/local/pgsql /usr/local/pgsql.old or replace your particular paths. 4. Configure the source code for your system. It is this step at which you can specify your actual installation path for the build process and make choices about what gets installed. Change into the src subdirectory and type: $ ./configure followed by any options you might want to give it. For a first installation you should be able to do fine without any. For a complete list of options, type: ./configure --help Some of the more commonly used ones are: --prefix=BASEDIR Selects a different base directory for the installation of PostgreSQL. The default is /usr/local/pgsql. --enable-locale If you want to use locales. --enable-multibyte Allows the use of multibyte character encodings. This is primarily for languages like Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. --with-perl Builds the Perl interface. Please note that the Perl interface will be installed into the usual place for Perl modules (typically under /usr/lib/perl), so you must have root access to use this option successfully. --with-odbc Builds the ODBC driver package. --with-tcl Builds interface libraries and programs requiring Tcl/Tk, including libpgtcl, pgtclsh, and pgtksh. 5. Compile the program. Type $ gmake The compilation process can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. Your milage will most certainly vary. The last line displayed will hopefully be All of PostgreSQL is successfully made. Ready to install. Remember, "gmake" may be called "make" on your system. 6. Install the program. Type $ gmake install 7. Tell your system how to find the new shared libraries. How to do this varies between platforms. What tends to work everywhere is to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH: $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH You might want to put this into a shell startup file such as ~/.bash_profile. On some systems the following is the preferred method, but you must have root access. Edit file /etc/ld.so.conf to add a line /usr/local/pgsql/lib Then run command /sbin/ldconfig. If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system. If you later on get a message like ./psql: error in loading shared libraries libpq.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory then the above was necessary. Simply do this step then. 8. Create the database installation. To do this you must log in to your PostgreSQL superuser account. It will not work as root. $ mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data $ chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data $ su - postgres $ /usr/local/pgsql/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data The -D option specifies the location where the data will be stored. You can use any path you want, it does not have to be under the installation directory. Just make sure that the superuser account can write to the directory (or create it) before starting initdb. (If you have already been doing the installation up to now as the PostgreSQL superuser, you may have to log in as root temporarily to create the data directory.) 9. The previous step should have told you how to start up the database server. Do so now. $ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data This will start the server in the foreground. To make it detach to the background, use the -S. 10. If you are upgrading from an existing installation, dump your data back in: $ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql < db.out You also might want to copy over the old pg_hba.conf file and any other files you might have had set up for authentication, such as password files. This concludes the installation proper. To make your life more productive and enjoyable you should look at the following optional steps and suggestions. * Life will be more convenient if you set up some enviroment variables. First of all you probably want to include /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or equivalent) into your PATH. To do this, add the following to your shell startup file, such as ~/.bash_profile (or /etc/profile, if you want it to affect every user): PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/bin Furthermore, if you set PGDATA in the environment of the PostgreSQL superuser, you can omit the -D for postmaster and initdb. * You probably want to install the man and HTML documentation. Type $ cd /usr/src/pgsql/postgresql-7.0/doc $ gmake install This will install files under /usr/local/pgsql/doc and /usr/local/pgsql/man. To enable your system to find the man documentation, you need to add a line like the following to a shell startup file: MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/pgsql/man The documentation is also available in Postscript format. If you have a Postscript printer, or have your machine already set up to accept Postscript files using a print filter, then to print the User's Guide simply type $ cd /usr/local/pgsql/doc $ gunzip -c user.ps.tz | lpr Here is how you might do it if you have Ghostscript on your system and are writing to a laserjet printer. $ alias gshp='gs -sDEVICE=laserjet -r300 -dNOPAUSE' $ export GS_LIB=/usr/share/ghostscript:/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts $ gunzip user.ps.gz $ gshp -sOUTPUTFILE=user.hp user.ps $ gzip user.ps $ lpr -l -s -r manpage.hp If in doubt, confer your manuals or your local expert. The Adminstrator's Guide should probably be your first reading if you are completely new to PostgreSQL, as it contains information about how to set up database users and authentication. * Usually, you will want to modify your computer so that it will automatically start the database server whenever it boots. This is not required; the PostgreSQL server can be run successfully from non-privileged accounts without root intervention. Different systems have different conventions for starting up daemons at boot time, so you are advised to familiarize yourself with them. Most systems have a file /etc/rc.local or /etc/rc.d/rc.local which is almost certainly no bad place to put such a command. Whatever you do, postmaster must be run by the PostgreSQL superuser (postgres) and not by root or any other user. Therefore you probably always want to form your command lines along the lines of su -c '...' postgres. It might be advisable to keep a log of the server output. To start the server that way try: nohup su -c 'postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data > server.log 2>&1' postgres & Here are a few more operating system specific suggestions. o Edit file rc.local on NetBSD or file rc2.d on SPARC Solaris 2.5.1 to contain the following single line: su postgres -c "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -S -D /usr/local/pgsql/data" o In FreeBSD 2.2-RELEASE edit /usr/local/etc/rc.d/pgsql.sh to contain the following lines and make it chmod 755 and chown root:bin. #!/bin/sh [ -x /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster ] && { su -l pgsql -c 'exec /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D/usr/local/pgsql/data -S -o -F > /usr/local/pgsql/errlog' & echo -n ' pgsql' } You may put the line breaks as shown above. The shell is smart enough to keep parsing beyond end-of-line if there is an expression unfinished. The exec saves one layer of shell under the postmaster process so the parent is init. o In RedHat Linux add a file /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres.init which is based on the example in contrib/linux/. Then make a softlink to this file from /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S98postgres.init. * Run the regression tests. The regression tests are a test suite to verify that PostgreSQL runs on your machine in the way the developers expected it to. You should definitely do this before putting a server into production use. The file /usr/src/pgsql/postgresql-7.0/src/test/regress/README has detailed instructions for running and interpreting the regression tests.